A Cobot as Conductor of a Symphony

Cobots that dance with humans have been around for a long time. In 2016, the audience at Südpol Luzern witnessed dance and robot history being written by Huang Yi, a choreographer from Taiwan. Cobots that set the pace for humans, on the other hand, are not yet the order of the day. The Dresden Symphony Orchestra is about to perform the “Roboter.Sinfonie”. After a while, conductor Michael Helmrath will hand over to MAiRA Pro S, a product from NEURA Robotics. According to Deutschlandfunk, the machine’s three arms will be able to guide the orchestra, which is divided into groups, through the most complex passages independently of each other. This will break completely new musical ground. According to the Dresden Symphony Orchestra’s calendar, the concerts will take place on October 12 and 13, 2024 at the Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Hellerau (Image: NEURA Robotics).

Cobots in Healthcare

After several postponements, the symposium “Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment” will be held within the AAAI Spring Symposia on March 22-23, 2021. One of the presentations is titled “Co-Robots as Care Robots” (co-robots are also called cobots). The authors of the paper are Oliver Bendel, Alina Gasser, and Joel Siebenmann. From the abstract: “Cooperation and collaboration robots, co-robots or cobots for short, are an integral part of factories. For example, they work closely with the fitters in the automotive sector, and everyone does what they do best. However, the novel robots are not only relevant in production and logistics, but also in the service sector, especially where proximity between them and the users is desired or unavoidable. For decades, individual solutions of a very different kind have been developed in care. Now experts are increasingly relying on co-robots and teaching them the special tasks that are involved in care or therapy. This article presents the advantages, but also the disadvantages of co-robots in care and support, and provides information with regard to human-robot interaction and communication. The article is based on a model that has already been tested in various nursing and retirement homes, namely Lio from F&P Robotics, and uses results from accompanying studies. The authors can show that co-robots are ideal for care and support in many ways. Of course, it is also important to consider a few points in order to guarantee functionality and acceptance.” More information about the AAAI Spring Symposia is available at aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss21.php.